>> > Nope. But 35 people per square mile isn't "packing them in". 25
>> > per square mile certainly isn't. Additionally, although much of
>> > Sartar is difficult to farm, the many valleys (like the Streamvale
>> > or the Nymie) are probably quite rich and productive.
>> I'm with Alex when saying that 25 people per square mile is packing it.
>> Your average fertile lowland village (as described in RQ 3rd ed. "deLuxe"
>> Book 3) has a radius of roughly two to three miles, say 8 square miles,
>> one of these under the plow or spade, 2 pasture and the rest rough land
>> for forest pasture, fishing, gathering and hunting, some of it shared
>> with neighboring villages. That's for roughly 100 people, not the 200 a
>> population number of 25 per square mile would indicate.
>
>Bonner County, Idaho (biggest city: Sandpoint population 6,835) has a
>population density of about 25 per square mile. Tons of hunting,
>skiing, farming, and pasture. With the exception of Sandpoint
>(Boldhome?), most of Bonner County's settlements (my favorite - Dover
>with a population of 325) are the size of Heortling villages. I realize
>that we are comparing apples and oranges - but my part of the world has
>lots of places that are a lot closer to Sartar than modern Europe (ok -
>Scandanavia still has plenty of largely empty space).
Can someone explain why medieval/ancient population figures are so important? In trying to reconcile Heortling populations with map scale the limitation is maximum population per square mile given the farming methods used. For that we can use 19th Century populations of similar rural areas - even early 20th century ones for places like Eastern Europe and Russia. Granted 19th century farming methods were more efficent than medieval ones but the result of that was a labour surplus which moved to the cities not people sat around idle in the villages. The use of magic would also improve productivity.
The main reason for lower population figures in ancient and medieval times would be unused land - there weren't enough people to cultivate it. That's particularly true in times of depopulation whether due to plague, war or whatever. There's no reason not to take the population figures for Sartar as reflecting the good times. The fimblewinter is going to cut the population drastically - 50%? maybe more.
Incidently wasn't this subject debated at length on the Glorantha digest a year or two back?
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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